Materialism (the idea that all that exists is matter) and the pretty-much-the-same idea of physicalism (the idea that all that exists is physical) both fail to credibly explain minds. There is nothing in the brain that explains the main type of human mental capabilities. For example, there is nothing in the brain that credibly explains human memory powers such as instant recall, instant learning and the lifelong retention of childhood memories.
A credible alternative to materialism and physicalism is the idea of dualism. According to this idea, you have both a physical body and an immaterial soul. But dualism is not the only option for someone rejecting materialism and physicalism. There is also the idea of idealism.
Idealism is the philosophical position that matter has no independent existence outside of minds that perceive matter. An idealist is someone who believes that the universe is just a collection of minds and the experiences of such minds. An idealist is someone who thinks that instead of our minds existing inside the solar system, it's the other way around: the solar system is merely something that exists as a perceptual regularity inside of minds such as ours.
To someone who is not used to thinking as an idealist, idealism may initially seem absurd. But the case for idealism was advanced in a surprisingly forceful way in the eighteenth century, by British philosopher George Berkeley. In his classic philosophical work The Principles of Human Knowledge (which can be read here), Berkeley argued for immaterialism, the idea that matter has no existence outside of minds that perceive matter.
Being a person who denies the reality of matter, an idealist needs to have a credible answer to the question of why people report identical experiences of observing physical things that don't really exist independently of minds, according to the idealist. For example, why do you and me and all of our relatives always have the same experience seeing a bright yellow thing in the sky during the day, and a bright white thing in the sky during the night? For a materialist or a dualist the answer is easy: because the sun really physically exists, and the moon really physically exists. But for the idealist who does not believe in the physical existence of the sun or the moon, this uniformity of observations is a problem that must be addressed.
Berkeley got around this problem by imagining a divine reality (God) that causes such uniformity of perceptual experiences. So, according to Berkeley, when we look up at the sky and see the sun fairly often, it is not because there exists a physical sun independent of minds; it is instead because a divine mind is causing such perceptual regularities in our minds. We know that movie directors can cause people to have certain uniform perceptual experiences. So, for example, all of the people who saw Saving Private Ryan in the movie theater had the same perceptual experience. So it's not too implausible that a divine power could cause humans to have certain types of uniform perceptual experiences.
The number of perceptual regularities that humans have are endless. Perceptual regularities are not just simple things such as the observation of a blue sky on a cloudless day or the observation of a round shape when we see the sun. Perceptual regularities include the most detailed information that is observed with stunning consistency and regularity by humans. For example, every single time a human's chest is opened up for surgery, the same organs are seen in the same places. And every time a person's blood is analyzed, a chemist will see the same distribution of elements and chemicals. A deeper analysis such as a DNA analysis would show that the sample always has the same type of genes, and that each type of gene has a particular arrangement of amino acids found only in that type of gene. Any theory that fails to credibly explain such perceptual regularities is worthless.
It seems that just such a worthless theory was advanced in the 2017 paper "An Ontological Solution to the Mind-Body Problem," a paper with too boastful a title. The author of the paper (Bernardo Kastrup) advances an offbeat theory of mind which he summarizes like this in the paper's conclusion:
"I have argued for a coherent idealist ontology that explains reality in a more parsimonious and empirically rigorous manner than mainstream physicalism and bottom-up panpsychism. This idealist ontology also offers more explanatory power than both physicalism and bottom-up panpsychism, in that it does not fall prey to either the ‘hard problem of consciousness’ or the ‘subject combination problem’, respectively. It can be summarized as follows: there is only universal consciousness. We, as well as all other living organisms, are but dissociated alters of universal consciousness, surrounded like islands by the ocean of its thoughts. The inanimate universe we see around us is the extrinsic appearance of these thoughts. The living organisms that we share the world with are the extrinsic appearances of other dissociated alters of universal consciousness. As such, the quest for artificial consciousness boils down to the quest for abiogenesis. The currently prevailing concept of a physical world independent of consciousness is an unnecessary and problematic intellectual abstraction."
This may sound somewhat impressive until we remember the very great folly of trying to reduce human minds and human mental experience to some bloodless abstraction called "consciousness." What we have to explain is not some mere abstraction called "consciousness" but the extremely complex and diverse reality of human minds, things such as imagination, selfhood, ideation, appreciation, memorization, morality, recognition, consciousness, emotions, speech, comprehension, creativity, recall, insight, beliefs, reminiscence, trances, introspection, pleasure, pain, reading, writing, awareness, perception, knowledge, attention, personality, fascination, interest, visualization, ESP, dreaming, volition, out-of-body experiences, near-death experiences and apparition sightings. You are not merely "some consciousness" but something gigantically more than that.
It seem that what Kastrup was attempting to advance was an idealism along the lines of Berkeley (one denying that matter exists except as a part of mental perceptions), with the very big difference that there was no reference to any deity. Thinkers such as Kastrup have no good answer to the question of why humans would have uniform perceptual experiences of matter if matter does not exist. If you and I are merely fragments of some primitive "universal consciousness," as imagined by Kastrup, and if the moon if the sun and the moon did not materially exist. There would seem to be no reason why you and I have should have identical experiences of perceiving the sun and the moon. And there is no reason why why you and I should have 1000 other types of identical perceptual experiences such as always having rocks feel hard and never perceiving a rock to be soft.
The problem is that Kastrup has hitched his wagon to the bloodless, abstract, shrink-speaking term "consciousness," and imagined some "universal consciousness" which he describes (in his paper's abstract) as a mere "ontological primitive." Having done that, he is left with a "primitive" bloodless abstract "universal consciousness" that seems to lack any will or intention, and would therefore be incapable of intentional effects such as making sure that you and I have uniform experiences of observing the sky. So it seems the idealism of Kastrup lacks the credibility of the idealism of Berkeley. Reading Berkeley you tend to think "that might well be true." No one should think such a thing when reading the "analytic idealism" theory of Kastrup. He lacks any credible explanation of why human perceptual experiences would have so many consistencies.
Kastrup has kept trying to sell his misguided ideology, which should actually be called "atheistic idealism" rather than the term Kastrup uses, "analytic idealism." Although Kastrup often seems to argue against materialism, I find much in common with materialism and Kastrup's position. Both are positions that can rely on shadow-speaking about human beings, in which human beings are depicted as mere shadows of what they are. Materialism claims everything can be explained by the "primitive" of mass-energy. Kastrup claims everything can be explained by some "universal consciousness" that he calls a "primitive," something he also calls "mind at large." The many stunning faculties of the human mind cannot credibly be explained by appealing to something primitive, but can only be credibly explained by some purposeful agency vastly greater than the human mind. It seems that in Kastrup's ideology humans are mere accidents of chance, just as they are in materialist ideology.
It is amusing to read a post by Kastrup in which he seems to tie himself into knots trying to explain away out-of-body experiences. Out-of-body experiences are events that seem as incompatible with Kastrup's thinking as they are incompatible with the claims of materialism. What goes on in out-of-body experiences is just what you would expect to hear reported if the world is made of matter, and you are a soul trapped in a body, a soul that can have the ability to leave such a body. In out-of-body experiences a person typically reports viewing his body from outside of his body, from a position about two meters away or a position near the ceiling of the room he is in. Out-of-body experiences seem to defy materialism, and to support the doctrine of dualism, that souls exist in addition to matter. Out-of-body experiences do not seem to fit naturally with any doctrine of idealism.
In the post here (entitled "The Phantom World Hypothesis of NDEs/OBEs") Kastrup tries to explain away such observations. He speculates that there may be what he calls a Phantom World somehow involved in such experiences. But he does not mean some world where spirits live. Kastrup's imagined Phantom World is some weird world of perceptual illusions.
Kastrup says, "what follows is still very highly speculative and should be taken with a whole bag of salt." He confesses that he is not a scholar of near-death experiences and not a scholar of out-of-body experiences. It sounds like he is also not a scholar of paranormal phenomena, because he sounds very surprised that people should report experiences of being out of their bodies. No one who properly studied the huge amount of evidence for clairvoyance published in the nineteenth and twentieth century should be surprised at all by such reports. During the very widely reported phenomena of "traveling clairvoyance" people would often report viewing things far away from their current bodily location.
Kastrup starts to argue against the reality of reports of out-of-body experiences, giving a very weak argument about evolution not being redundant. He argues that evolution would not have given us both the ability to see with our eyes and some other clairvoyant ability to see (when the heart is stopped) without our eyes. Here Kastrup sounds just exactly like a Darwinist materialist, which tends to back up my suspicion that there is much in common between his thinking and that of a materialist. If the human race is not a mere accident of nature, but the result of transcendent causation, and humans have souls rather than minds-being-caused-by-brains, then we are not any mere products of evolution, and have no business making arguments such as "evolution would not have given us more than one way of seeing."
Kastrup gives us this mumbo-jumbo "clear as mud" explanation of the Phantom World he imagines:
" The result may be an inaccurate but rather complete cognitive map, a Phantom World. I call the resulting map a Phantom World because mind-at-large isn't actually perceiving the world; it isn't actually representing its own states on a screen of its own perception. Instead, it is merely inheriting the perceptual states of myriad former alters and spontaneously assembling them together through cognitive similarity and correspondence. The resulting pseudo-perceptual world is thus an approximation containing inaccuracies and imprecisions (the interpolations). Nonetheless, it should still feel as though it were a (colloquially physical) world perceived, since it is made of qualities of perception like the colours and sounds you and I see and hear. During a RED or OBE, I contend that the dissociative boundary that defines the individual mind of a person becomes weakened, porous, permeable, allowing for partial but direct access to external states in mind-at-large, without the intermediation of a screen of perception. And since these external states contain the Phantom World, the experiencer gains temporary access to that pseudo-perceived world.rld constituted of perceptual qualities originally generated by living people and other organisms. I suggest, therefore, that the experiencer is not actually perceiving the real world, but the Phantom World instead. For this, the experiencer indeed does not require working eyes or ears, for he or she is accessing the compound result of myriad episodic memories—the assembled jigsaw puzzle—of people who did have working eyes and ears. "
Don't ask me to untangle this gobbledygook of speculation. After several paragraphs more of equally tangled gobbledygook, Kastrup states that according to his Phantom World hypothesis, those having out-of-body experiences and near-death experiences "aren't truly perceiving the colloquially physical world around them." This claim has already been falsified. Below are some cases already reported in the literature of near-death experiences and out-of-body experiences, cases in which people did perceive the world around them during out-of-body experiences, with their perceptions later verified as being accurate. (They are from a book discussed here.)
Case 2.1: A dying cancer patient remarked to Ricardo Ojeda-Vera (a doctor's assistant) that he had written a beautiful letter to his mother. Ojeda-Vera had written such a letter. The patient “described in detail exactly what he had written,” and accurately recounted that he had worn a green bathrobe while writing the letter. The patient claimed to have seen Ojeda-Vera writing the letter while she had “looked down on him from the ceiling.” Three days later the patient died.
Case 2.2: A patient reported having an out-of-body experience (OBE) during a cardiac arrest, and reported seeing a penny on the top of a cabinet. The cabinet was checked, and a penny was found there.
Case 2.3: In this well-known case, a woman named Maria reported floating out of her body during a cardiac arrest, and that during such an experience she saw a dark blue tennis shoe on a ledge near a window on the third floor. A search found such a shoe in such a location.
Case 2.5: At a hospital a woman who had a cardiac arrest reported having an out-of-body experience during which she floated out of her body, and saw a 12-digit serial number on the top of a six-foot tall respirator. The respirator was later checked and found to have exactly that number on its top.
Case 2.6: A man reported having an out-of-body experience during which he observed a 1985 quarter atop an 8-foot-high cardiac monitor. The top of the monitor was checked, and a 1985 quarter was found on its top.
Case 2.8: A man reported having an out-of-body experience during which he observed medical workers putting defibrillation paddles on him and gel. This matched his actual medical experience during his cardiac resuscitation.
Case 2.11: a woman reported floating out of her body during a cardiac arrest, and that during such an experience she rose up through the hospital's floors, rising up above the roof, where she saw the skyline and a red shoe. A search of the hospital's roof found a red shoe on the roof.
Case 2.12: A man reported that during his cardiac operation he floated out of his body and returned to his home, where he saw a caretaker having sex there with his girlfriend. The caretaker admitted this had happened.
Case 2.13: A woman reported that during her operation she floated out of her body and saw doctors telling her family (incorrectly) that she had died. It was later confirmed that the family had been told that.
Case 2.14: A woman reported having a near-death experience in which she looked down at her body from a corner of a hospital room during her operation. She then reported seeing in a paranormal way two of her grandmothers saying in a cafeteria that they were going to have a cigarette, even though neither smoked. It was confirmed that this improbable thing had happened.
Case 2.15: A patient in the intensive care unit of the hospital had a near-death experience in which he was reportedly able to hear the conversations of relatives elsewhere in the hospital, such as a waiting room conversation about a green toy tractor knocking down a wall of toy bricks. The conversations had occurred far away from his location in the hospital.
Case 3.1: A woman put under general anesthesia during her operation reported details of her operations from an “on the ceiling” perspective, and also correctly reported details of an operation in the adjacent operating room, such as the amputation of a leg and its placement in a yellow bag. She made the report as soon as she woke up, and had no way of knowing such information.
Case 3.7: A man missing his dentures correctly reported a nurse putting them in the drawer of a cart during his cardiac resuscitation, when he should have been completely unconscious.
Case 3.8 A man reported a near-death experience during cardiac arrest. He reported that during the medical efforts to revive him, he saw that a nurse dropped a tray and was scolded about it by a doctor. The account was confirmed.
Case 3.9 A woman had a near-death experience during cardiac arrest. She reported hovering in a corner of the room near the ceiling, and noticed a rose-shaped hair clip and a bottle breaking, details she should have been unaware of. The details were accurate.
Case 3.10 A patient unconscious during his operation reported floating above his body, and accurately described details of his operation.
Case 3.11 This dramatic near-death experience account is told in the youtube.com interview here. A patient was written off for dead, and had no vital signs for "close to 20 minutes." During that time he had "no heart beat, no blood pressure, no respiratory function." But then in a seemingly miraculous manner the patient's vital signs reappeared, and he eventually "recovered fully." The patient described a near-death experience in which he observed post-it notes in the operating room that he should have been unable to observe because his eyes were taped and he was unconscious. The details were accurate.
Case 3.12 A patient whose heart was stopped reported a near-death experience in which he heard some paramedic say something to the effect that the patient would never revive, but a rookie paramedic could use the patient to practice CPR. After undergoing an amazing recovery, the patient told what he had heard to one of the paramedics, who was amazed that the man had apparently heard what the paramedic had said.
Case 3.16 Medical staff tried to save a patient who had undergone cardiac arrest, and they decided to stop the resuscitation efforts. They later found a faint pulse, and resumed the revival efforts. The man survived, and described the medical efforts trying to revive him. He “got all the details right, which was impossible” because he had no pulse during such efforts.
Case 3.18 A man who had a cardiac arrest during an operation reported to his doctor that he had seen a brown leather key fob fall out of the doctor's pocket during the operation. The doctor confirmed that such a thing had happened, at a time when the patient should have been unconscious.
Case 3.29: This case is the famous Pam Reynolds case, which I discuss here (while also discussing an equally astonishing case more recent). While having her senses blocked and her temperature dramatically lowered during an operation that should have guaranteed unconsciousness, Reynolds reported a near-death that included very specific details of her operation she should have been unaware of.
Case 3.30: A boy who underwent cardiac arrest recalled that during the medical efforts to revive him he "had been up in a corner of the room and had looked down on his body." He correctly recalled several details of the procedure.
Case 3.33: A man who underwent cardiac arrest reported an out-of-body experience in which he felt himself "rising up through the ceiling" and then seeing some hospital area in which there were mannequins. Above the ICU he was in was a CPR training area in which there were dummies (resembling mannequins) used for CPR training.
Such examples show us that Kastrup is incorrect in claiming that those having out-of-body experiences and near-death experiences "aren't truly perceiving the colloquially physical world around them," but are merely in some illusory Phantom World when they have such experiences.
Kastrup's speculations about a Phantom World that is not some world of souls is as incoherent and unbelievable as his claims of us getting our minds because we are "alters" of some primitive mind-stuff of "universal consciousness." Ironically, in another essay on his site, Kastrup complains about materialists engaging in ad-hoc construction of speculative "epicycles" to cover up their explanatory failures. It seems that the Phantom World imagined by Kastrup (not a world of spirits) is just such an epicycle.
I may note how absurd is the "evolution would not be redundant" argument that Kastrup appeals to in trying to reason that humans could not have some clairvoyant ability in see in addition to their eyes. We know that the human body actually does have redundant features. You have two kidneys, but you can get along just fine with only one. You have two eyes, but can see very well with just one. You have two ears, but can hear with only one. A cave-man could get along well with a single arm. Similarly, you have two lungs, but could live with only one. So "evolution would not be redundant" is a very bad argument.
It is utterly fallacious to argue against the existence of abilities on the grounds that evolution would not given them to us. The human mind has many an ability that cannot be explained as something evolution gave us to help us better survive and reproduce in the wild. These include things such as philosophical reasoning ability, the ability to perform and understand advanced mathematics, the ability to produce and appreciate lofty works of art, and the ability to memorize very long bodies of text. The co-founder of the theory of natural selection (Alfred Russel Wallace) wrote an essay describing such abilities, his essay "The Limits of Natural Selection as Applied to Man," which you can read here. The abundance of such abilities is one of the major reasons for thinking that scientists lack any credible explanation for the origin of the human species.
Kastrup thoughts on reports on paranormal phenomena should not be taken very seriously, as he confesses in one post a lack of interest in them (which we may presume is a failure to decently study them):
" I am not an expert in parapsychology and do not have the background required to say something of distinguished value here. I am also not personally very interested in extraordinary phenomena because I find the ordinary mysterious and confusing enough."
It is not clear why we should take anyone very seriously as a philosopher of mind who apparently does not study such a topic of such very high relevance to issues in the philosophy of mind.
In the same post Kastrup confesses this, referring to Rupert Sheldrake:
"Rupert highlights that Analytic Idealism is still naturalist and reductionist. That is entirely correct. I think the world unfolds spontaneously, according to its own inherent dispositions (i.e., the observed regularities we call the 'laws of nature'), and without supernatural intervention from an outside agent beyond the boundaries of nature itself."
Kastrup's seems to denounce materialism, and uses language different from that of a materialist. But when it comes to the key questions thar really matter, such as whether the human race is a mere accident of nature, it seems that Kastrup's ideology at its core is pretty much the same as that of materialists. And his "analytic idealism" fails for the same type of reasons that materialism fails, in that it fails all over the place to explain the marvels of human bodies and the wonders of human minds. "Atheistic idealism" would be a more honest name for his philosophy.
Kastrup can be a careless reasoner. In one post he states this:
"There is nothing you can pin down about the infant, the child, the teenager or the young adult you once were that has remained intact in you today. Everything about them has changed: their bodies, appearance, feelings, dreams, thoughts, opinions, everything."
This is not true at all. An old person like me has many memories of his youth, and such memories have not changed. Although many of my opinions and feelings I had as a teenager have changed, I still have many of the opinions and feelings I had when I was a young man, and my feelings towards my mother and siblings have not changed in 50 years.
The same poorly-reasoned post gives me further suspicions that there is no huge difference between the thinking of Kastrup and that of a materialist, despite the superficial differences and differences in language. Kastrup's concept of death seems to be essentially identical to that of a materialist not believing in life after death. He seems to imagine a person's death as a "you will no longer be a separated alter of mind-at-large or universal consciousness" deal which is for all practical purposes the same as death without an afterlife. Observational reality tells us a different tale, and near-death experiences and out-of-body experiences are part of the huge amount of evidence in favor of the survival of persons and souls after death.
What goes on with Kastrup's writing seems like what goes on in the writing of physicist Paul Davies. Davies wrote one book entitled God and the New Physics, and another book called The Mind of God: Science and the Search for Ultimate Meaning. But don't be fooled by such titles, which give us the wrong idea about what Davies thinks. When you buy the books and read them you get content that any atheist will be happy with. Similarly, any atheist will be happy reading Kastrup's works. In Kastrup's "Bizarro World" it seems that nothing has to be well-explained. In Kastrup World we can believe in a world of the most enormous perceptual regularities, without any God or matter to explain such regularities. It's pretty much a "you are excused from having to credibly explain anything" kind of deal, and "you are excused from having to study the details of reality." This may be just what the besieged materialist is looking for, since he may be sick of hearing how so many of his explanations fail to hold water.
Reality is enormously complex both physically and mentally. To properly study reality, you must spend very much time studying the details of biology, biochemistry, physics, psychology, medical case histories and parapsychology, as well as studying the facts of neuroscience (not to be confused with the unfounded claims and groundless boasts of neuroscientists). But there's a shortcut. You can claim that matter does not exist, and that all that exists is "universal consciousness," and that we are all just fragments of "universal consciousness." That makes your explanation job real easy, because then you are postulating that there is really Only One Thing that exists. Thinking that way is a convenient shortcut for the lazy, but it's pretty much the silliest shortcut.
Below is a diagram from a future post of mine entitled "Why Many Subjects Must Be Deeply Studied for Someone to Properly Ponder the Origin of a Human." In the post I explain at great length why every one of these subjects should be studied deeply if someone is trying to have good ideas about how human minds and human bodies arise. I will not attempt to give here a shortened explanation of my reasoning.
Postscript: A long critique of analytic idealism can be read on the page here. I thank the author for emailing me the link to his critique.
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